10.08.2023
2021: strongest improvement in Open Access-share yet
As part of our monitoring, we evaluated 14,641 publications resulting from SNSF-funded research published in 2021. Of these, 77% are available in Open Access (OA). An unprecedented increase over the 63% measured for 2020.
The share of publications not being openly accessible in any version went down from 18% to 12% in 2021. We saw an increase in all three eligible routes to OA (see the information box on What is Open Access), with “hybrid” now making up the biggest share at 32%. For 2021, the Read & Publish agreements with major publishers, negotiated by swissuniversities, show their full effect. “Gold” continues to grow at the same rate as observed in last year’s analysis. Notably, the “green” road has gained in importance and now accounts for 17%. This road means making a publication openly accessible with a secondary publication deposited in a repository. A relevant development, as it indicates improving compliance with the SNSF’s and many institutional Open Access policies.
What is Open Access?
Open Access (OA) is the free online availability of scientific publications to all interested parties worldwide. The results of SNSF-funded research must be openly available. We cover the costs for this. Researchers can fulfil their OA obligation via the gold, green and hybrid road.
- Gold: immediately openly available in a pure OA journal or as an OA book or OA book chapter, usually after payment of a fee.
- Green: freely available as a secondary publication in an institutional or disciplinary repository.
- Hybrid: openly available in a subscription journal after payment of an activation fee or covered by institutional Read & Publish agreements.
- Other OA: openly available version is found but does either not reflect the latest revision (e.g. preprint) or cannot clearly be assigned to an OA road (e.g. missing data)
- Restricted: no openly available version found.
Large and surprising improvements
After five consecutive OA monitoring exercises looking back as far as 2013, we can conclude OA is here to stay. Since then the OA share has nearly doubled. Although the SNSF has not yet achieved its goal of OA for all publications resulting from its funding, we are getting closer fast with an unprecedented increase of 14 percentage points over 2020.
For 2021 we observe a surprisingly large decrease in the category “other OA”, down to 11%. This category includes openly available publications that do not reflect the latest revision, such as preprint versions. Or we lack data to assign them to a more specific OA category, for example when information on the version or where the publication is hosted is not available. We expected this category to shrink over time, as publishing infrastructures, discovery services and metadata in general improve. Still, a decrease of 8 percentage points from 2020 to 2021 is remarkable.
Looking at the changes by research areas, the most notable shift happened for other OA publications in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). We measured 6% for 2021 as compared to 33% for 2020. Understanding this shift in detail would require analyses beyond the scope of this monitoring. Yet, the sudden and large change seems linked to the Read & Publish agreements negotiated by swissuniversities. Many publications previously only available in hard-to-detect other OA categories appear now to be published under the standard hybrid OA classification, accounting for the largest share at 35% of all publications from SSH.
Using publications: licenses
Open availability to interested readers is central to the idea of Open Access. So is the right to use the publications, work with them and create something new from them, while properly attributing the work to the original authors. In 2022, the SNSF joined cOAlition S and revised its OA regulations. For approved grants whose proposals were submitted on or after 1 January 2023, all resulting publications are required to apply a Creative Commons Attribution or CC-BY license (see the information box on What are Creative Commons licenses?). This requires original authors attribution while allowing the broadest possible use.
The SNSF did not require any license for articles resulting from its funding in 2021. We still looked at the available data on the used licenses, to gauge whether the requirement from 2023 might present a challenge. Even without any explicit requirement, 44% of all articles were published under a CC-BY license. The most restrictive license (Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives or CC-BY-NC-ND) takes a distant third place with 14%. Again, the national Read & Publish agreements play an important role, as CC-BY licenses were required as default, inevitably increasing their share for articles relating to SNSF funding as well.
We conclude that CC-BY was already the most widely used license for articles resulting from SNSF funded research in 2021. Making it the standard from 2023 onward is feasible. But it also needs to be said that data on licenses was far from complete, with 35% of articles lacking information on licenses. While this is a minor problem for the present monitoring, it is a relevant hindrance to the widespread use of scholarly articles. Missing machine-readable license information precludes the legal use of modern technology to analyse large numbers of scholarly publications. Including the prominent current developments around “artificial intelligence”. Given the rapid progress around “other OA”, metadata on licenses will likely improve over time as well. The importance of this seemingly minor aspect should not be underestimated. Indeed, the full benefit of Open Access depends on stakeholders being legally able to make optimal and creative use of published knowledge.
What are Creative Commons’ licenses?
Open Access publications are publicly accessible but of course still protected by copyright. As authors, researchers own the rights to their works. They grant users like publishers or the public certain permissions to use their creative work under copyright law. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation that developed licenses to simplify handling copyright in the digital age. Their six license types make it easier to understand what a user can do with a publication.
You can find detailed information about the individual licenses on the Creative Commons’ website.
Data, text and code of this data story are available on Github and archived on Zenodo.
DOI: 10.46446/datastory.oa-monitoring-2021